While I’d talked up Rwanda’s Golden Cup competition last September, I’ve only late come to realize that I hadn’t actually tasted any of the coffees from this competition. That couldn’t stand, of course. And so this week the coffee delivery man brought me a package from Intelligentisa Coffee.

Intelligentsia’s greenie, Geoff Watts, was fortunate enough both to jury the competition, and to buy a number of lots… this coffee being an all Bourbon melange of coffees from three districts: Nyamasheke, Huye and Gakenke.

Just ground, this blend’s aromas are clean and sweet, with brown sugar the dominant note. On brewing the sweetness continues with a bit of apple pie spice. In the cup, mango and caramel flavors are accentuated by a shimmering acidity, and buttery, syrupy body. The finish is long, and sweet, and leaves a taste of candied pecans on the tongue.

Sweet. Balanced. Lyrical. This is Zen poetry in a cup.

Recommended, and available at Intelligentsia Coffee.

Above and beyond PEARL, however, Duane Sorenson – Stumptown’s founder and chief protagonist — found a need that had gone unmet. The people harvesting coffee in Rwanda’s hilly terrain had to carry heavy loads of coffee cherry from remote growing regions to washing stations. And they had to do it quickly. Cheaply. Reliably. No matter the weather.

Rwandan coffee farmers needed bikes.

Back in Portland, Duane started putting things together. He rounded-up a network of avid sport cyclists and bike messengers (naturally… most all those messengers were fueled by Stumptown coffee already) and started fundraising. He held benefit dinners. Awareness-raising rides. And in a matter of months he had spun off a non-profit organization to focus on the effort, and had 260 custom-built cargo bikes in the ground in Rwanda.

Today Bikes to Rwanda is a year old. (Happy Birthday!) And to-date they have delivered 400 cargo bikes to Rwanda, opened a bicycle repair shop, arranged innovative financing for coffee growers and more. (Maybe you should think about giving them a tax-deductible birthday present?)

Learn all about it: watch the (awesomely) GOOD video, produced by Good Magazine.

I can’t help but take a moment, however, to mark the outstanding results of Rwanda’s Golden Cup competition and auction. In a few short years Rwanda has emerged from its national nightmare to become an increasingly prominent player in the specialty coffee trade, and perhaps nothing to-date has marked this more significantly than the results of the events of the past few days.

The cupping jury has seen some phenomenal coffees, some scoring as high as 95 — even 98! — and the results of the auction itself are now in. The winning bidders? The usual suspects: Stumptown walks away with the top lot from the Muyongwe cooperative, at $25 per pound. Lots from Ngoma, Karaba and Kanzu fetched in the neighborhood of $15/lb. and winning bidders included Zoka, Counter Culture and Intelligentsia.

Look for some of these stunning coffees at a winning roaster — perhaps even before the turn of the year.

So I brewed some coffee anyway.

I brewed a “regions of the coffee world” sampler, really: Centrals, Indos, a winey African or two. Even a couple of real stinker coffees that I forgot to throw away. And just for kicks and grins, I set up a blind tasting –six coffees, labeled A through F — so I wouldn’t know what was in each cup, but I could look each up later.

I couldn’t smell anything. Not a thing! No fragrance of just-ground coffee. No aroma of brewing coffee… nothing. I couldn’t discern flavors: no berry or cherry, no raisin or grape or plum… not even any of the farmyard funk in a Sumatra that I’d dissed just a day or two prior.

Just when I was about to give up entirely I realized that, while I couldn’t smell and I couldn’t taste, there were still sensations to be found. So I settled myself a little bit and focused on what was there…

Acidity. That little tingle on the tongue and soft palate — which on any other day would probably be zinging with at least some of the coffees I was tasting — was still present, if something of an echo of its usual self. And so by focusing on acidity alone I separated higher acid coffees from their lower acid counterparts.

Body. The sensation of weight or movement in a brew — that was pretty easily determined, too. There were a few chewy coffees in the bunch, and some that were quite light… and so within the groups of high acid and low acid coffees I further arranged them by their apparent weight.

Sweet & Sour. While the coffee was hot I was pretty much oblivious to any sensation of sweetness, but as the coffee cooled I was able to note some differences. And I arranged the cups again.

In the end my continuum (and the revealed coffees) looked something like this:

Now while I happen to think the results track pretty darn well — with the particular coffees that were on the table, anyway — I won’t be holding my nose during my next cupping session. Unless, of course, that pesky flavor is obfuscating something else.

100 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri, along the route of Highway 24, you’ll find a pecan the size of a UPS delivery truck. Here, at the confluence of the Grand and Missouri rivers, the fertile bottomlands produce not only roadside attractions worthy of Neil Gaiman’s attention (look for it in his latest work, Yet More American Gods) but also prodigious numbers of black-trunked pecan trees standing in sentinel rows as far as the eye can see. And each tree, in turn, produces prodigious pecans… Oh, they’re not the biggest in the land (that title probably goes to Georgia, despite the many-tonned concrete pecan’s hyperbole) but bite for bite, they’re the tastiest you’ll find anywhere. Nutty, sure… but also buttery, warm and sweet. By flavor alone you might mistake them for cashews… but they’re not one bit tropical, but instead Missouri’s favorite native… er, nut.

The Coffee

In a nutshell, friends and neighbors, this is the surprising flavor of Counter Culture’s Rwandan coffee offering — it’s a nutty, nutty bean. Sourced from the Koakaka coop, and processed at the very same Karaba washing station as Green Mountain’s very spiffy (and long gone) Rwandan Special Reserve offering, Counter Culture’s Rwandan is an exemplary coffee in every way: meticulous preparation, and expert and attentive roasting.

Just ground, the coffee offers the intriguing fragrance of coffee blossom and ripe, sweet pears. Brewing, its aroma tantalizes with notes of maple syrup and caramelized sugar. The cup’s brightness is well-controlled in the roast — some acidity has been traded for complexity and warmth — which I think is a good choice. Its flavor… nutty. Rich, toasty, buttery pecans… caramelized and sweet. Its roundish body carries the cup’s sweetness through the finish, leaving a departing kiss of honey and vanilla even as the cup cools.

If I sound a bit like I’m gushing… well, I am. This is a brilliant cup… the result of exceptional work at every step from tree to cup.

Highly Recommended. Now go buy some, already.

P.S. My thanks to Mark Overbay at Counter Culture for the sample… and to Peter G. for his excellent source work in Rwanda. Peter, Rwanda’s specialty coffee trade is much better off for your efforts… and so are we all.

At Green Mountain we celebrated the coffee of Rwanda by offering it as our very first Special Reserve origin. Its reception exceeded our loftiest expectations… Rwanda Karaba-Bourbon proved an exceptionally fragrant, extravagantly sweet and dynamic cup. It sold out within days.

Starbucks, too, is now featuring a Rwandan coffee — Rwandan Blue Bourbon — as their second “Black Apron” release of this year. I’m tasting a cup right now, and it’s easily the most remarkable coffee from Starbucks I’ve tried… period. They have been exceptionally respectful of the origin character, offering this cup as a full city roast rather than their more typical deep-in-second-crack Vienna style.

Counter Culture Coffee, however, beat both of us to the party… they offered their first Rwandan coffee last year, and have followed it with a second coffee — Rwanda Karaba Koakaka — which is available now, and were it not for the vagaries of UPS, would also be on my tasting table. (I’ll offer my tasting notes the moment it arrives.)

Finally, Chicago’s Intelligentsia has a Rwandan offering — or had — as they appear to be waiting on a new lot of coffee at the moment. When it arrives it will be Intelligentsia’s second offering as well.

A common thread among these roasters is an intimate involvement on the ground in Rwanda. Green Mountain’s Lindsey Bolger, Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano and Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts have each spent a number of weeks in Rwanda over the last two years, working side-by-side with coffee growers and processors, and establishing the basis for sustainable relationships between coffee growers and coffee roasters. Working in concert with USAID-funded project PEARL, they’ve worked to raise the bar for Rwandan coffee, and to raise awareness of the potential of the origin. Along the way, these coffee ambassadors have done much to raise the spirits of the Rwandan communities they worked in. Their presence, their assistance and their dedication has done great things… and has been welcomed with open arms and warm hearts.

For too long, tiny, landlocked Rwanda has been haunted by its past. A dozen years ago the world watched — horrified, amazed, idle — while nearly one million souls perished in a violent ethnic struggle. The Rwandan genocide has left an indelible mark on its people… on all of us, really. And so Rwanda’s reemergence on the world stage is a profound thing. It’s an event that offers hope, surely, but also — perhaps — redemption.

Lindsey Bolger — Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ queen bee of green coffee sourcing and farm relationships — has secured a remarkable lot of coffee from Rwanda. It’s a 100% bourbon varietal, all picked in an eleven day period that marked the very peak of the season’s harvest. This tiny lot of coffee is the inaugural offering in Green Mountain’s new Special Reserve line of coffees… exceptional coffees, hand-roasted in small batches, roast-dated and shipped within 24 hours of roasting.

If I sound slightly stoked about this… well, I am! This has been a long time coming. More, since the announcement of the program, nearly the entire lot of coffee has already been pre-ordered… so get yours while the gettin’ is good!